In all his years in the service, Kolhammer had never fought a naval battle at close quarters. Even Taiwan had been contested from well over the horizon. The only experience he had of closing directly with an enemy was in warding off suicide attackers using speedboats.

On one of the panels of the main display, however, he could see Soviet and Japanese ships pounding at each other from just a few miles away. And the Sovs were having a very tough time of it. All their major combatants had been sunk or heavily damaged in the surprise attack by the jet-powered tokkotai.

By the time Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet came pouring through the channels of the lower Kuril Islands, they were opposed by a handful of crippled destroyers, or maybe even corvettes. The Japanese probably could have finished them off with conventional air strikes, but for some reason Yamamoto wanted to get in close with his guns. Perhaps he knew it was the last chance he’d ever have to fight like that.

“Ten seconds from release, Admiral.”

“Thank you,” Kolhammer replied, switching his attention back to his own onscreen battle.

There was no drone coverage of the target. Torres and her guys were doing this the old-fashioned way. Consequently he had to be content with watching a CGI projection of the unfolding attack. It was all very primitive, but he knew that over on the Enterprise, Spruance and his staff were taking the same images in their refitted CIC and probably feeling like they were there in the cockpit. Everything was relative.

Lieutenant Torres’s voice, clipped and slightly distorted, came over the speaker system. “I have the target. No triple A. No radar locks. Releasing payload.”

…

The GBU-20 detached and fell away, beginning a long glide toward the side of the small mountain. The Skyhawk seemed to bounce upward after it let go of the sixteen-hundred-kilo weight.

Torres heard both of her wingmen release as she brought the A-4 around and powered up the laser designator. The pod was new, the product of a collaboration between a San Fernando-based start-up company called Combat Optics and a Bell Telephone subsidiary set up within the Zone to exploit the parent company’s future intellectual properties. The two directors of Combat Optics were 21C senior chief petty officers whose enlistments had expired about two months after the Transition. With a total of fifty years’ experience between them in the care and feeding of precision-guided munitions, they returned to civilian life and went straight to the downtown offices of O’Brien and Associates with a proposal to set up Combat Optics and go hunting for federal government contracts. The company was now publicly listed, employing two thousand people, and was worth well over half a billion dollars. Its main line of business was producing strap-on laser guidance kits for dumb iron bombs, designator pods, and night vision equipment.

The system Combat Optics had settled on was a variant on the early Paveway bomb series-for which a relatively new contemporary company known as Texas Instruments was being paid a 5 percent royalty in a deal hammered out by Maria O’Brien. The early Paveways had the benefit of being simple, rugged, and well within the capability of local industry to manufacture, given engineering guidance by the principles of Combat Optics.

So as Lieutenant Anna Torres hauled her Skyhawk jet fighter around, the designator pod lit up and threw a beam of coherent light down onto the cliff face where the Force Recon team had discovered the launch tubes. Torres laid her “sparkle” on a point chosen by the Clinton’s Combat Intelligence as the most likely location for the opening of the shaft, given the data provided by Denny’s patrol before they were wiped out.

Three Penetrators whistled down through the humid topical air. Pop-out fins adjusted the flight path to keep the wobbling ordnance on course. For Torres, who was used to fire-and-forget systems, it was a nerve-racking business trying to fly the jet, hold the laser on target, and maintain enough situational awareness to avoid a midair collision.

A voice crackled in her headset. “We got flak.”

“We’re on it,” another replied.

She heard a few distant booms and tried to ignore them. Suppressing ground fire wasn’t her department. She had to hold the target…

…hold the target…hold the target…

Three blurs flashed across the low-res black-and-white screen she was using to guide the bomb in. Two large puffs of smoke and a single smaller one marked the impact point.

Then, a split second later, the side of the mountain blew out.

The footage from the mission recon bird-an A-4 fitted out with 21C battle-cams, a small lattice memory cache, and an old digital transmitter-arrived on screen in the Clinton’s CIC via relay from the Hawkeye a few minutes later. Kolhammer could hear cheering outside the CIC where the vision was playing on screens throughout the ship. The reaction in the Combat Center was subdued by comparison, more of a buzz than an outbreak of whoopin’ and hollerin’.

It was immediately clear that the bombing run had been a success: the replay showed massive secondary explosions being set off in the wake of the primary blast. Damage analysts on both the Clinton and the Enterprise were already picking the footage apart, but Kolhammer didn’t need to know much more. Half the mountain had blown out. Other scenes ran on multiple screens: strings of high-explosive warheads dropping into what looked like raw jungle, only to detonate, setting off further explosions that bespoke the presence of fuel, ammunition, and more planes-the “half-buried” bunkers Denny had identified.

On two smaller, flatter islands the Clinton’s second and third Skyhawk squadrons hammered away at more facilities. On one atoll, another Force Recon team called in and adjusted the strikes from a hiding point. The third unit had called in that they were under attack from Japanese ground forces, and nothing had been heard from them since.

“Enterprise reports they’re launching now, Admiral.”

“Thank you,” Kolhammer said.

The islands were now in range of the older, prop-driven attack planes like Spruance’s Skyraiders. Where the A-4s had gone in with precision strikes, the Skyraiders were simply tasked with smashing flat anything left standing.

“Extraction flights lifting off the Kandahar, sir.”

Kolhammer grunted in acknowledgment. Maybe Lonesome’s guys could grab up that last ’temp unit. If they couldn’t, nobody else could.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto paused, eyes closed, to breathe in the delicate scent of the tea. There was little to distract him from the brief moment of stolen pleasure. The bridge of his flagship was quiet and orderly as the helmsman held station at the center of the fleet lying off Hokkaido.

The giant battleship scarcely moved on the light southeasterly swell that rolled away to break softly upon the shore of the large island miles off to port. His surviving carriers rode the same gentle motion of the sea around her. A flight of Zeros, rare radar-equipped night fighters, climbed slowly into the west to patrol the starlit skies above the ruins of the Russian armada.

Yamato’s sister ship, Musashi, was silhouetted by a quarter moon that bathed the enormous battle wagon in a soft, silver glow. The rest of the Combined Fleet’s big gun platforms-the Kongo, Nagato, and Yamashiro-were out of his line of sight, but the evidence of their work lay all around. Soviet naval power had been smashed by the warrior spirit of the Thunder Gods.

A score of destroyers churned up the waters, alert to the possibility that even one American or Russian submarine might sneak in among the resting giants on a suicide mission. As Yamamoto admired the sight and raised the thin porcelain cup again to his lips, he could only marvel at the fates that had placed him here.